I won't build a business on Twitter

Twitter has made it clear that it doesn't believe in it's API and won't work with partners in good faith.

I was considering taking Donate Your Account to the next level. I was considering building a business around it.

Twitter's recent API restrictions will force Donate Your Account to change in a dramatic way. Moreover, there are no guarantees at this point that Twitter wouldn't just cut off the application. It isn't what they want built on their platform.

The restrictions are going to force Donate Your Account campaigns to start over. Everyone currently shares the same Donate Your Account OAuth application on Twitter. This is a problem. It is a bottleneck and the risk increases as more people use the service. There is also a hard limit of 100,000 users that can be authenticated through an OAuth application. We will hit that limit soon.

Campaigns will have to get all of their donors to donate their Twitter account again. The new donations will be linked to a Twitter OAuth Application that is specific to the campaign. Instead of sharing the same resource to make authenticated requests to Twitter's API, everyone will have their own OAuth application.

Donate Your Account will not run as a centralized service for much longer. A federated approach is the only way.